


What Would You Say?

by GloriousBlackout



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-20 00:43:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriousBlackout/pseuds/GloriousBlackout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock once asked what John's last words would be. Now he's about to find out his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Would You Say?

" _If you'd been murdered, in your very last few seconds, what would you say?"_

When Sherlock had asked this question he'd wanted an imaginative answer - something interesting, something _clever_. Perhaps that was why John's brutally honest reply of ' _Please God, let me live'_ had caught him off guard for a moment. He may have been the most brilliant man in the room but the fact still remained that the others understood something that Sherlock couldn't comprehend- that a person's final moments were usually their most human.

Coming face-to-face with his own mortality was never something that had bothered Sherlock. Much to the annoyance of his brother or Lestrade, Sherlock had often got into the habit of endangering his own life in order to confront a criminal or to finally bring a challenging case to an end. To prove he was clever John had once said. He'd grown used to getting himself injured and had received enough lectures from Lestrade to last him a lifetime (" _You're a civilian Sherlock! You can't just go after criminals on your own!"_ ), but it seemed that he could never learn his lesson. After all, he'd accepted long ago that he'd end up shaking Death's hand and accompanying him to Hell thanks to his own recklessness one day. And that had never bothered him.

However that was before he had met John and had gained something to lose.

And now he was going to lose him, he had to. In order to protect John he had to disappear, he had to 'die'. Of course, as always he had a plan, a way of escaping certain death but for some reason he found that that didn't make his situation any less painful. The prospect of hurting John, the man who had become so much more than just a colleague to him, was almost as unbearable as the idea of actually dying. Had this been a few years ago then Sherlock would probably have laughed cruelly at himself for feeling like this. It seemed that John had slowly made him more human, almost caring. Maybe that was why he was hurting so much, balancing atop St Barts, pretending that he was a fraud and trying desperately to get John to believe him.

Something important was coming to an end, even if it wasn't his life.

And in the end he found that he had no interesting last words for his best friend, no imaginative clues to leave behind for others to follow. All he had in that final moment before giving into gravity was the only thing worth saying to the man on the other end to the phone;

"Goodbye John."


End file.
